It may not be much, but until I can get home and have a look at what’s going on in the rest of the world, here’s the Eliot Spitzer scandal as described by a 3-year-old. I don’t think kids in general (or even this kid in particular) are special or precious or anything, but this [...]

It’s a recording that predates Thomas Edison’s inventions, and even predates the idea of playback itself. In 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter who dabbled in inventions and had no grand plans, came up with a device that created squiggles on paper from sounds that were shouted or sung into a barrel. These [...]

If this map of the Apollo 11 moon landing is any indication, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t travel very far away from their launch capsule at all. NASA has superimposed a detailed map of where they went when they left the lander over a regulation baseball field, and except for one Neil Armstrong foray [...]

Q. Is it possible to score a goal with a head in hockey? It is doable. But you shouldn’t try – because you can injure yourself very seriously, so that you won’t even realize whether it was you who scored the goal, maybe you won’t even remember your own name. You use your head to [...]

I’ve loved John Otway since I first heard him. He takes his low self-esteem and does a better job at having fun with it than anyone else I know. And I’m a sucker for his songwriting. I thought about posting this because I was mucking about and found the Beware of the Flowers Motorcycle Club, [...]

From Modern Mechanix magazine, June 1930, here’s a pdf of an article showing how carny games are rigged. I don’t suspect most of these have changed right through to today: Another popular game is the “Test Your Strength” device in which a lever, when struck by a hammer, catapults a rubber marker up a steel [...]